[PLUG] Bloat

Sujeet Ghanvat eghanvat at gmail.com
Wed Oct 1 15:14:55 IST 2008


Hi Aditya,        Nice observation. It can be explained with slightly
modified Parkinson's law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law> :

"Data expands to fill the space available for storage"

Its going to happen more in future. Paul Graham has nicely talked about it
in his article Hundred-Year Language. <http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html>
Programmers are going to waste the memory and the extra cycles the faster
hardware is going to give us. The culture of hacker days (70-80's and even
early 90's) are gone. No one cares about memory usage anymore. Programmers
are advised not to care as it sounds like premature optimization. Only the
people who write javascript for website seem to worry about size of the
program. But with expanding  bandwidth it will matter less and less.

I really don't think programs are going to be written to take small space
and cycles. The programs are going to expand to whatever space and power is
available. Unless we write our own and care about what we do.

-Sujeet G



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